The name of Ephraim McDowell is omnipresent throughout Danville. In fact, the town is practically synonymous with the man. Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center, McDowell Manor, McDowell Park (between Centre and The Presbyterian Church of Danville, where there\u2019s that big stone monument commemorating\u2014who else\u2014Ephraim McDowell), the McDowell House\u2026 the list goes on. But who was this man, and why does the whole town reflect his legacy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The story as it\u2019s usually told is officially recounted by two state historical markers in town, one on Main Street across from Pearl Hall and the other outside the McDowell House on 2nd Street. On Christmas Day 1809, Ephraim McDowell, \u201cthe father of modern surgery,\u201d miraculously performed the world\u2019s first successful ovariotomy by removing a 22-pound ovarian tumor from Jane Todd Crawford. Adding to the mysticality of the legend is how Jane Crawford rode over 60 miles on horseback through the cold snow to get from her home in Green County to McDowell\u2019s Danville medical office and, decades before anesthesia, \u201csang hymns\u201d to get through the surgery. This is basically, with a few minor embellishments here and there, the same story that tour guides give in Frankfort\u2014where Ephraim McDowell\u2019s statue stands proudly in the capitol rotunda\u2014and in Washington, D.C., where the same statue is one of two representing Kentucky in the National Statuary Hall (the other, if you\u2019re wondering, is of Henry Clay, a 19th century plantation owner and politician from Lexington). In all of these sanitized accounts, McDowell is always portrayed positively as a mythic hero, a medical pioneer we should proudly remember and aspire towards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The signs and tour guides don\u2019t mention McDowell\u2019s experiments on enslaved women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the same 1817 article<\/a> in which McDowell first published his account of Jane Todd Crawford\u2019s surgery, he also recorded two experiments he conducted on enslaved women brought to his office by their masters after the Crawford surgery. It is clear that, despite McDowell\u2019s belief that these operations were inadvisable, it was their masters\u2019 \u201cearnest solicitation\u201d and above all the fact that each woman was \u201cunable to fulfill her duties\u201d that justified medical intervention. In the first case, despite his belief that extracting the tumor would be \u201cinstantly fatal,\u201d he continued on with the operation \u201cby way of experiment\u201d without any regard for the woman\u2019s life or wellbeing, let alone consent. Despite McDowell thinking the case was \u201cnearly hopeless,\u201d she did in fact manage to survive the excruciating procedure in which her \u201cbowels were completely enveloped\u201d in \u201ca quart or more of blood\u201d that flooded her abdomen when McDowell cut into the tumor. He characterizes both of the enslaved women as happily returning to their forced labor \u201cwithout complaint\u201d after recovering from the experimental procedures on their bodies. He clearly saw these cases not merely as medical success stories but as successes in fulfilling their main objective, which was first and foremost to maintain the profitable exploitation of these women\u2019s labor for the plantation economy of antebellum Kentucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two years later, McDowell published another article<\/a> describing three more experimental surgeries he conducted without consent on enslaved women. The first of these was one of the patients he had written about in 1817, who he thought had fully recovered, but whose tumor had regrown to the size it was when he first operated on it. A second one is said by McDowell to have \u201crecovered happily\u201d from the surgery but generally remained in poor health. He asserted that her \u201ccomplaint is hysterical.\u201d Two days after the third woman\u2019s particularly gruesome surgery, she suffered \u201cviolent pain in the abdomen, together with an obstinate vomiting.\u201d After being bled by McDowell without any lessening in her pain, she died on the third day after her surgery from an inflamed abdomen stemming from the operation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike Crawford, none of the four enslaved women\u2019s names were recorded by McDowell. We know only that one of them came from Danville and two others came from neighboring Garrard and Lincoln counties. McDowell did not name where the fourth enslaved woman came from, only writing that she \u201cwas brought to [him] from a distance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is also not known whether he performed experimental surgeries on other enslaved women. Although he published only five accounts of abdominal surgery, including Crawford and the four enslaved women, he boasted in a letter that he had performed a total of twelve, according to the Smithsonian<\/em><\/a>. While the four documented surgeries on enslaved women all took place after Crawford\u2019s, it is possible that McDowell had already \u201cpracticed\u201d his surgical technique on enslaved women before Crawford\u2019s surgery in 1809. If so, he likely made a deliberate choice to exclude these women from the historical medical record to instead frame Crawford\u2019s almost-mythical surgery as the first of its kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Smithsonian<\/em> also quotes the assistant director of the McDowell House Museum saying that the history of these surgeries on enslaved women is not generally addressed in exhibitions or tours at the museum. Instead, it is up to individual tour guides whether they mention the history of slavery at McDowell\u2019s residence, where between ten and fifteen slaves lived. Thus, visitors receive an inconsistent image of McDowell as a slaveowner who experimented on enslaved people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, McDowell is memorialized throughout town\u2013as well as in both the state and federal capitols\u2013as a mythic hero. The monument to him between Centre and the Presbyterian Church of Danville, erected by the Kentucky State Medical Society on the spot where he was reinterred in 1879, gives him the legendary moniker, \u201cThe Father of Ovariotomy.\u201d Like at the McDowell House Museum, his public legacy is whitewashed to erase his participation in the institution of slavery and his excruciatingly painful experiments on enslaved women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Commemorating McDowell and others in this way without the full context paints a particular historical narrative that erases the violent systems of white supremacy and patriarchy that allowed for their success. J. Marion Sims, a 19th century surgeon who followed in the footsteps of Ephraim McDowell and similarly experimented on enslaved women, was also long celebrated as the \u201cFather of Gynecology\u201d and publicly memorialized for his medical and scientific achievements. But in recent years, people have sought to acknowledge the full history of his work, which preyed on the unconsenting bodies of Black women for his own benefit. This has culminated in the removal of Sims\u2019 statue from Central Park in New York City and the installation of new public sculptures<\/a> remembering three of the women whose bodies Sims experimented on in Montgomery, Alabama, where the brutal experiments took place (near another statue of Sims that still stands in front of Alabama\u2019s state capitol).<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we are serious about acknowledging the history of Ephraim McDowell and his legacy in Danville, Kentucky and the country, then we must tell the full story. We cannot continue remembering McDowell while constantly and intentionally forgetting the enslaved women who paid for his success with their own bodies. Even if they never get a statue or monument of their own\u2013a monument they deserve just as much as McDowell\u2013we must not ignore their presence. It is our duty to see them and honor them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n by Duffy Oakley With the controversy around the newly installed John Marshall Harlan statue, it bears investigating the many other people commemorated on and around campus who have similarly contested legacies. In a series of Cento articles, I will strive to better inform the campus community about the figures who loom large at Centre and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":9100,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9099"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9104,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9099\/revisions\/9104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/image-24.png\")
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